Description:
NewsEye: A Digital Investigator for Historical Newspapers is a European digital humanities research project dedicated to improving access to historical newspapers published between 1850 and 1950. Drawing on approximately 15 million digitised newspaper pages from the national libraries of Austria, Finland and France, the project developed innovative artificial intelligence tools for character recognition, newspaper structure analysis, article identification, topic extraction, named entity recognition, opinion analysis and multilingual text mining. The interdisciplinary consortium brought together three national libraries and research teams in computer science, humanities and social sciences from France, Austria, Finland and Germany. Supported primarily by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, NewsEye developed methods for processing historical documents affected by imperfect digitisation and optical character recognition. Its research covered newspaper collections in French, German, Finnish and Swedish. The project resulted in the NewsEye digital platform, which combines a searchable historical newspaper library with dynamic text analysis tools and a personal research assistant. These resources enable researchers and the wider public to investigate large newspaper collections and explore questions in history, literature, gender studies and media analysis. By the end of the project, NewsEye had produced 64 conference publications and 13 journal articles or book chapters. Recognised with a European Heritage Award in the Research category in 2024, NewsEye represents an important contribution to open science, digital humanities and the preservation and interpretation of Europe's historical press.